Category Archives: Orthodox Unity

1916-2016: Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at His footstool; for He is holy.

Psalm 98, 5 (Septuagint)

Rus is the footstool of the Throne of the Lord.

St John of Kronstadt

Foreword: Personal

However absurd it may seem, including to myself, I have long felt and observed signposts to my destiny in my heritage and the life of Tsar Nicholas II. For example, the future Christian Emperor Tsar Nicholas II was born in the Alexander Palace in the Imperial Capital of Saint Petersburg on the feast-day of St Job the Much-Suffering in 1868. At the same time my great-grandfather Thomas was born in the poorest conditions of the workhouse in a provincial village in Eastern England. However, fifty years later, in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, whose emblem was the double-headed eagle uniting east and west, the Imperial Family and their faithful servants were murdered in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Urals on the confines of Europe and Asia, uniting east and west. As for my great-grandfather, he died in the same village as he was born in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands. That invasion ended four years later with the liberation of Vienna, where my father went in 1945, and of Berlin by those whose homeland had been so treacherously and bloodily attacked with death, rape, fire and pillage.

I was born on the 19th July, the day in 1918 on which the assassins of the Russian Imperial Family ritually finished destroying their earthly remains. As a child, I collected postage stamps: only one stood out from the 3,000 others – that with the face of Tsar Nicholas II seemingly calling to me to serve his cause. Almost exactly fifty years after the Tsar’s martyrdom, in 1968, 100 years after the birth of the martyred Tsar and 50 years after his sacrificial martyrdom, in a Scottish city almost on the same latitude as Saint Petersburg, I was called to learn Russian and three months later, in a message coming from the east, called to serve the Russian Orthodox Church. Then there was the tutor to the Tsarevich, Fr Nicholas Gibbes, the first English Orthodox priest in almost a millennium, like me a man from the provinces in an Orthodox country as a teacher and becoming a Russian Orthodox priest. Fr Nicholas served in Oxford, where I studied in the same college as Felix Yusupov, the murderer of Tsar Nicholas’ holy elder. And in darkest 1974, when there seemed no hope of it at all, I was called on to write of the coming resurrection of the Russian Church and Empire (1). I never sought any of this, and yet this has been my calling and my destiny.

1916-1981: The Fall of the Christian Empire and of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire

On 30 December 1916, Anglo-Zionist spies in Saint Petersburg, sent by those who by then had in 1916 taken control of the bankrupted British government and aided by decadent, anti-Christian, Russian aristocrats, carried out the assassination of a much-slandered Russian Orthodox holy man and spiritual counsellor to the Imperial Family. Exactly as foretold by its victim, this would begin the process that would lead to the overthrow in 1917 of the Tsar, then on the very point of victory and so of ending the vile and atrocious First World War that was slaughtering the flower of Europe. His overthrow would lead to almost two more years of vile war, millions more of victims, and unspeakable bloodshed throughout the Russian Empire, exactly as the Mother of God forewarned innocent peasant children in distant Portugal in 1917. This meant the collapse of the Christian Empire after 1600 years and its replacement by two false Empires, both founded on Western materialism by those who had engineered that collapse. These Empires were the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the Western Atheist Empire, the first centred in Moscow, the second in New York.

In 1981, 64 years after the 1917 coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg, the only remaining free part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that outside Russia and centred in New York, carried out a heroic act. This was under the leadership of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret (+ 1985), once an exile in China, who had been chosen as Metropolitan by Archbishop John of Shanghai, once also an exile in China (+ 1966). The Metropolitan’s surname was Voznesensky, also the name of the street of the Ipatiev House, where the Imperial Family was martyred in Ekaterinburg. (In 1998 the Metropolitan’s earthly remains were found incorrupt). As for Archbishop John, canonized a generation later (2), he had been slandered, persecuted and even taken to court by false Russian brethren in exile. This heroic 1981 act was when the Church of the emigration at long last canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors. At their head stood Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family and servants, faithful to the end. This act was an act of repentance on behalf of all Russian Orthodox and those Russian émigrés whose ancestors had vilified and betrayed Tsar Nicholas.

This repentance of part of the Russian emigration, living in apparent freedom, had taken a scandalously long 64 years. St John of Shanghai had called for it almost fifty years before. Nevertheless, it represented the long-awaited repentance by descendants of those in the emigration who by treason had abdicated from the Throne and brought about the February 1917 coup d’etat. They had then fled for their lives into an often impoverished and harsh exile, blaming the Tsar for their foolishness, treason and poverty. For that February coup had in turn led to the October 1917 seizure of power by satanic atheists who then ritually murdered the Tsar, his Family and faithful servants. This 1981 canonization led to the rapid deaths of three Soviet leaders from 1982 on, and to the end of stagnation. And in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after its founding act on 30 December 1916, the Bolshevik Atheist Empire, centred in Moscow and which had murdered the Tsar collapsed. Thus, the murders of the Tsar and Imperial Family, ordered from New York in 1918, were literally reversed by an act ordered in New York in 1981. The first part of the curse had been lifted.

In 1988 we wrote that what had begun in New York must be completed in Moscow, that is, by the vast majority of the Russian Orthodox Church, inside Russia. We did not know then that the Bolshevik Atheist Empire would, so painfully for its peoples, finally dissolve in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after the December 1916 assassination by British spies. This is what we wrote then: ‘Our hope is from the living and suffering faithful on Earth and in Heaven, the Martyrs and Confessors of Christ, the One Lord and Saviour. Is then the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of the Russian Church now coming to an end? As yet we cannot know for sure. We shall be certain only when all those many Martyrs and Confessors are venerated without exception, openly, officially and universally in the Russian lands, when the work begun in New York is brought to its fullness in Moscow; this will be the ‘True Pascha’ of which St Seraphim prophetically spoke…The canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors is a gift of God made through the Church for the spiritual enrichment of the whole Orthodox Church, of all the Orthodox Christian peoples…’.

ReChristianization and DeChristianization

When in June 1941 Nazi tanks invaded the Soviet Union, in the western Ukraine (formerly eastern Poland), naïve Ukrainian peasants greeted the Nazis as liberators from Bolshevism, because the peasants saw crosses on the Nazi tanks. They soon learned of the evil of the Nazis who sadistically slaughtered all who stood in their way. Paradoxically, the Nazi invasion brought about a measure of repentance in the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the reinvigoration of the implicit Christian values of pre-Revolutionary culture that had been preserved, in terms of the provision of social justice (in the Tsar’s Russia you received free health care for the payment of a stamp costing one rouble per year) and also of ‘socially conservative values’, of normal family life. There dawned on some the realization that the liberation from Nazism of Vienna and Berlin in 1945 could have happened in 1917 under Tsar Nicholas II. That would have been far less bloody, far more disciplined, like the Russian liberation of Paris in 1814, with concerts of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin in the main squares of those cities to celebrate Christian culture, as in Palmyra this year.

The story of the slow but gradual reChristianization of the Russian Lands after 1941, increasing especially rapidly fifty years later, after 1991, is the reverse of the Western story. If the red star of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire became ever more cross-like, the white star of the Western Atheist Empire became ever more satan-like. The two became like two trains on parallel tracks, but heading in opposite directions, to heaven and to hell. Unlike the Bolshevik Atheists, who did not reject their inheritance of social justice and socially conservative moral values from the Tsar’s Empire, Western Atheists have rejected Christian culture. True, anti-Christianity had been inherent in Western history from the Crusades to Wars of ‘Religion’, from Colonization to the French Revolution, from the French and British siding with Islam to invade Russia in 1854 or the German siding with Islam against Russia in 1914. But in the 1960s, 50 years after the Western-orchestrated ‘Russian Revolution’ of 1917, the West entered into a frenzy of deChristianization, rejecting all Christian values implicit in its culture, even male and female roles in the family, resulting in today’s gender hysteria.

1981-2016: The Fall of the Western Atheist Empire

So, in August 2000 the far greater part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that inside Russia, was at last freed, completing the work begun in New York 19 years earlier, canonizing the New Martyrs and Confessors, at their head Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family. This has led in turn to the process that is now reversing the second part of the blood-soaked pattern of catastrophic 20th century and early 21st century history. In other words, since 2000 Russia has been rising and the Western Atheist Empire, centred in New York, its myths of ‘freedom and democracy’ spread like tentacles throughout the world, has been falling. Just as New York freed Moscow between 1981 and 2000, so since 2000 Moscow has been freeing New York. This is the fall of the Empire founded on the ruins of the Christian Empire by traitors in 1917, bringing US troops into the Great War, just as demoralized Russian Imperial troops left it. That ensured 100 years of worldwide bloodshed, just as the Mother of God had warned peasant children in Fatima in Portugal in 1917, though those children would be bullied into silence and their revelation utterly deformed by men of the Vatican machine.

Thus, on the feast-day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, 11 September 2001, we witnessed the attack on the New York Twin Towers, the beheading of the Western Atheist Babylon. Engineered in secret by forces still unknown, though much suspected, this murderous attack with its 3,000 victims foretold the beginning of the collapse of the Western Atheist Empire that stretches throughout North America, Western Europe, Australasia and to vassal states like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. It had come to power by financing from New York and organizing the collapse of the Christian Empire eighty-four years before, in 1917. 1917 to 2001: 1984 had indeed come. For the collapse of the Twin Towers did not lead to repentance and the questions, ‘Why is this happening to us?, and, ‘What have we done to deserve this?, as did the collapse of the Tower of Siloam (Lk 13, 1-5), but to illegal, unjustifiable, vengeful, bloody and chaotic invasions of innocent Middle Eastern and Islamic countries. These have in turn bankrupted the indebted US branch of the Western Empire and led to unbearable anarchy and unspeakable misery for the peoples in those lands.

Why did these invasions take place? For oil and gas? For strategic advantage and to set up ever more US military bases? For the usual neo-colonial, Western bullying and asset-stripping of weaker countries, unable to defend themselves against sophisticated arms of ‘shock and awe’? Yes, superficially, all this was the case, but this was only a superficial reason, to keep greedy banksters and military industrialists quiet. In reality, these bloody invasions of Islamic countries, carried out by the neocon elite against the interests of ordinary, hoodwinked and now bankrupted Americans, zombified by their corporate media, took place for another reason. They were designed to weaken the Muslim world, so that the Temple in Jerusalem can be rebuilt by the Zionists in the place of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and there the representative of their chief, the prince of this world (Jn 14, 13), can be enthroned. This is why the possible election of the nationalist and populist Trump next month is feared as a huge setback to their plans by the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ neocons. For whatever he may be, he may at least put US internal affairs above meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.

These invasions are also causing the collapse of the European branch of the Western Empire, called the European Union, a weak group of vassal puppet-states controlled by the American Union and heir to the Soviet Union in terms of its tyranny. This absurd, overstretched and bankrupted Union, never wanted by its peoples but only by its moneyed elite, and used to extend a Fourth Reich of German political and economic hegemony over all Europe, is now being overwhelmed by the invasion of Islamic refugees, resulting in divisions everywhere. This leaves only a weakened Western German core, set up to lead Europe under US control at the end of the Second World War, when it was occupied and colonized by US troops. However, if the countries that make up the present EU can regain their freedom and sovereignty, Europe could be saved by returning to its cultural roots. It could return not to recent human and political manipulations and cheap surrogates like Protestantism and Catholicism, but to its real Christian first millennium roots, so long lost, forgotten, scorned and despised, to Orthodoxy Christianity, to the Church of God.

Afterword: The Christian Empire May Rise Again

Today the Russian Federation, once the centre of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire which was dissolved 25 years ago in great pain for its peoples, collapsed through treason and cynical lack of belief in anything except self-interest, so-called Communists becoming Capitalists overnight, is starting to save itself. The Soviet Union had to die if it were to turn its back, however hesitantly, on the Bolshevik heritage of alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce. Thus, the restoration by patriots of the Christian Empire after the 100-year long nightmare that began at the end of 1916 now actually looks possible. In this way the Russian Federation can start to save the ever more fragile European nations of the Western Atheist Empire, bringing them back to their senses, back to true freedom (not the ‘freedom’ to murder millions of children in the abortion holocaust or the freedom for sexual perversion), to true culture (not the Coca-Cola culture of feeble imitations of imported cowboy culture) and to their own national sovereignty (not national degradation). A spectre haunts Europe – the spectre of freedom, sovereignty and national restoration, which are spelled Brexit.

But why is this process of salvation, which is now beginning, nowhere yet complete? Because nowhere is repentance yet complete. St Seraphim of Sarov said: ‘I will glorify the Tsar who glorifies me’. Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’. But for the Tsar to be glorified, we must first be brought together into Rus by full repentance, by understanding the sin of regicide and all that followed and by accepting the Christian values which he and his family incarnated. This will mean those in the dead Bolshevik Atheist Empire, and at least some in the Western Atheist Empire, which is also to die, overcoming their treason, lies and prejudices about the Christian Empire of the last Tsar. Only when this has been done can the Lord raise up the still unrevealed and unknown man who is to become the next Christian Emperor, the next and perhaps the last Tsar. He alone will resist him who is to be enthroned by our enemies in Jerusalem, as St John of Kronstadt prophesied. But the next and coming Christian Emperor will not appear until the masses are first ready to accept and glorify the last Christian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. Yea, come, Lord!

Notes:

1. ‘Beloved Land, soon to be made fragrant and all-holy, shone through and warmed by the love of so many martyrs’ blood, there is an unknown redolence and radiant light in thy still brightening churches; we neither ask why nor question how, but we know and feel and have Faith’. (From ‘Premonition’, Chapter I of ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’, English Orthodox Trust, 1995, 1997 and 2014).

2. St John was the first saint of the Church Outside Russia. Two others have since followed: Bishop Jonah of Hankou (Hangchow – also in China) (+ 1925) canonized in 1996, and Archbishop Seraphim of Sofia (+ 1950), canonized in 2016. Will Metropolitan Philaret be the fourth? His possible canonical canonization under discussion.

“This article also appeared on Katehon.com http://katehon.com/article/1916-2016-today-tsar-nicholas-ii-says-i-will-glorify-those-who-glorify-me”.

From Fragments to Wholeness

Introduction

Three experiences and the great wonderment and many questions that they raised, all hinting at the existence of a much greater reality beyond the veil, have shaped and inspired my life. These experiences have all been of fragments and vestiges of the great Imperial Christian Civilization which was rejected over a period of between 1,000 and 100 years ago and has since been largely forgotten and lost. Although wholly rejected, derided and even unknown to most, this Civilization may yet, by Divine Providence and human repentance, be restored. That is our hope in our tiny corner of Eastern England.

My life has been spent in the task of fitting together these three experiences or pieces into a great whole, the big picture, where all these pieces belong. Only together as part of a whole do they have their full meaning. Alone they are just separate facts, tantalizing gleams and hints of some greater reality, keys to the great gates of a Kingdom that remains locked until you have all three of them and the daring to unlock them. With time, patience and prayer, by consulting many and reading the books of those whom I could not consult in life, with great effort, I have been able to put all the pieces together and found the big picture.

The Cottage of the People

The first experience came to me in childhood. In 1963, in a spot that I can take you to today, I sat with two nineteenth-century great-uncles, their caps respectfully removed, in the Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds. A host of silent questions arose in my mind. Why did they, such humble representatives of the people show such respect here? Who was this St Edmund, that this town had been named after 1,000 years before? What was a saint? How did you become a saint? Why were there only ruins here now? And why were there no longer any saints? So many questions, so few answers and none able to answer them.

By the age of twelve St Edmund had led me to discover other local saints in my native Essex and Suffolk, Sts Botolph, Cedd, Albright, Audrey, Osyth and Felix. Places and churches were named after them, but no-one could tell me very much about them. Their names had become an empty ritual of sounds, without any meaning, divorced from spiritual reality. I became aware that further away there were other mysterious saints, but they were all only fragments. Thus, as a child, I was thwarted, unable and unequipped to put any of these little pieces together, into the great, but mysterious and mystifying whole.

The Altar of the Faith

From August 1968 on I began to discover that these saints, however important they had once been locally, belonged to a far greater whole, to a universal background and culture, a whole Civilization, the Civilization of the Saints. I discovered that, once in their context, they would stop being names and stories in dry and dusty books and that they would come alive again and I could speak to them as my companions. This was all part of the greater discovery that what had been presented to me as Christianity was not that at all, but a system of tedious, State-organized ethics devised to control the masses.

Then came the realization that through its inevitable degeneration this false Christianity had been responsible for the opposite of authentic Christianity, Secularism. Whether in its Protestant or its Roman Catholic form, it lay outside the real Christian Church, the Orthodox Church. Finally, in 1972 when I visited the Soviet Union, I realized that the essential and largest part of the Orthodox Church was there, so cruelly persecuted and its integrity damaged, bringing people at worst to superstitious ritualism, Sovietized fragmentization. Outside that, there were other smaller Churches, but even more nationalized and compromised.

The Throne of the Sovereign

Having by my thirty-third year pieced together the saintly Cottage of the People and the holy Altar of the Faith that I served in the so troubled and sadly divided emigration, I began to understand that both Cottage and Altar had to be completed by the sacred Throne, the Throne of the Sacral Christian Empire, which depended on the Cottage and the Altar, but which also protected them both. In the Kingdom of Heaven there was no need for it, but on earth this was the glue that kept everything together. The Throne had been overthrown on earth many decades before. But what was the hope that the Throne could be restored?

At that time there seemed to be virtually none, for the Throne lay in ruins. The Imperial reality had been reduced to fragments, each tiny part claiming to be the Empire! It had been reduced to freemasonry and corruption, to fallen compromises and flag-waving provincialism, to sterile intellectualism and private personality cults. It had been betrayed by disincarnate modernists who could not see the greater picture, as they lived in the bubble of their own egos; they could not see the great forest as a result of looking for too long at their own little saplings. Could it, by the grace of God and human repentance, be restored?

Conclusion

Thus through the saintly Cottage of the People I discovered the Kingdom of the Spirit, through the holy Altar of Faith the Kingdom of the Son, and through the sacred Throne of the Sovereign the Kingdom of the Father. I had discovered in the saints the spiritual essence of the People, in the Faith Orthodoxy and in the Throne Sovereignty. I had discovered Christian Civilization, the opposite of the anti-Civilization that I had been born into, with its world wars, death camps, atomic bombs, cult of mammon and ruthless exploitation and genocide of Non-Europeans. I had seen the big picture, discovering the unique Christian Civilization.

Elitism despised and mocked the Cottage of the People; the Establishment falsified and compromised the Altar of the Faith; Secularism betrayed and scorned the Throne of the Sovereign. But I had seen the big picture, discovering the unique Christian Civilization. It could be called Roma Nova, the Third Rome or Holy Rus, though to some those terms have nationalistic undertones, but it is simply the Sacral Christian Empire. That Empire began in York on 25 July 306 and ended in Ekaterinburg on 17 July 1918. However, has it ended? Or has it merely been interrupted by ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’?

The Resurrection of the Christian Empire

http://katehon.com/article/resurrection-christian-empire

Introduction: The Need for the Christian Empire

Since we believe in God the Holy Trinity, our theological, political and social ideal is to strive to bring Heaven down to earth in the form of a Christian Empire, with as much worldwide influence as possible. This is, after all, what we pray for every day in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Any other attitude promotes the disincarnate heresies of Gnosticism and Origenism, heresies because they deny the Divinizing Incarnation, that God became man that man might become God-like.

The Christian Empire until 1917

This Christian Empire, founded in the fourth century by St Constantine the Great and then continued in the Russian Lands, was the place of special grace, of a culture that was protected from the perverted values of the apostasy of the West and the paganism of the East. This Christian Empire existed as Holy Rus until February 1917, when the Emperor was overthrown and martyred by the international agents of industry and banking outside it and by Western-inspired apostasy and treason, caused by the loss of Orthodoxy, inside it.

Let us recall that the Empire’s spiritual and therefore moral values were profoundly Christian. Indeed, the social, political and economic values of the Christian Empire went around the world, establishing the Hague Court of Justice, promoting anti-militarism and anti-colonialism in East and West alike. This can be seen in the stance of the Christian Empire towards the appalling scramble for Africa of Western European countries and the Boer War, and towards still sovereign countries like Tibet, Ethiopia, Siam (Thailand) and China.

Internally, there was the establishment of free education, welfare measures and social justice, despite the furious opposition of decadent aristocrats and the greedy rising capitalist bourgeoisie. Externally, there was the building of churches for the missionary spread of Orthodox Christianity outside the Empire, notably in Japan, the USA, Western Europe, China and Korea, wherever there was a consciousness of the need to confess Orthodox Christianity before the heretical Western world and the pagan Eastern world.

Stage One of the Restoration of the Christian Empire

Obviously, we would like to see ourselves, our children and our grandchildren living in such a restored Empire once more. However, the Christian Empire can only be restored when the mass of Orthodox Christians repent for apostasy, becoming conscious that our Faith is not some private piece of piety or folklore, an intellectual hobby, without any incarnational social and political consequences. We must be seized by the consciousness of our duty and the importance of restoring the sacral Empire for the continuation of the world.

Over the last generation, since 1991, we have seen the first stage of this restorative process in the main part of the Empire, at present called the Russian Federation. Mass baptism after 1988 and the gradual rebuilding of the Church, however slow, and then in 2000 the recognition by the Jubilee Council of the first of the New Martyrs, including the Imperial Martyrs. Although this was much resisted by disincarnate fantasists and pseudo-Orthodox ecumenists and renovationists, these were vital steps towards reversing the apostasy.

Then came the consciousness of the existence of the ‘Russian world’. However racially limited that is, this was a further step in the continuing restorative process. Now, a generation on from the collapse of militant atheism, there are at last in Russia Orthodox Ministers of Defence and Education (once a bastion of atheism). We can wish now for an Orthodox Minister of Health, since that too has long been a bastion of the vestigial and primitive atheism of backward-looking materialists. And churches are again being built in many places abroad.

The Next Stage

Only now can we begin to understand that the next stage in the process of healing and restoration must be the understanding of the significance of the Imperial Martyrs and all those attached to them. There will be no restored Christian Empire with worldwide influence until there is a Christian Emperor. And there will be no new Emperor until all have repented for overthrowing and martyring the last Emperor, Nicholas II, his Family and all those around them, and rejecting their values, so despised by the aristocrats of Saint Petersburg.

Those around them include the martyred Imperial servants, canonized in 1981 by the Church Outside Russia, all those who remained faithful to the end, whether suffering martyrdom or not, like Fr Nicholas Gibbes in England who was converted by the Imperial example. Necessary here is the repentance for attitudes towards others at the Imperial Court. It is significant that there are both in Russia and in the emigration those who still justify the slaying of the Imperial Family and also denigrate all those who remained faithful to them.

Notably, there is the case of Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova (Taneeva), the confidante of the martyred Tsarina Alexandra. In 1923 she became a nun in exile in Valaam and she is known as Mother Maria of Helsinki. She died on 20 July 1964 and her grave in Helsinki is adorned with flowers, yet she is despised and slandered and falsified memoirs have been published. The aim is not just to discredit her, but also the Imperial Martyrs. If she, their close friend, can be discredited, they argue, so the Martyrs themselves can also be discredited.

The Significance of the Imperial Servants

Mother Maria was slandered because her 1923 ‘Memories of the Russian Court’ (1) told the truth about the Imperial Family and Gregory Rasputin. Notably she spoke of the ‘plot of the Grand Princes’. They did not want the truth about the Lord’s Anointed to be revealed. In this affair the atheist regime of the Soviet Union and aristocratic traitors in the emigration were entirely at one. The truth she told contradicted their self-justifying slanders which concealed the real reason for the downfall of the Christian Empire – treason.

The arguments of all the enemies of the Church were filled with their ideology of disincarnate Gnostic intellectualism and philosophical fantasies. These discredit the Incarnate Christian Empire, reducing the Christian Faith to private, individualistic, Protestant-style pietism without any practical ramifications in everyday life. They reject the God-given arrangement of symphony, or harmony, between Church and State, in favour of a system where the world rules and religion is left as a voluntary affair for personal intellectual life.

Therefore, the enemies of the Church had systematically to discredit all those connected with the Imperial Family. And here we come to one of the problematic areas in this process of repentance, to another Imperial servant. For the Revolution did not start in February 1917, but two months earlier, on 30 December 1916. This was 25 years before the next German invasion of 1941 and 75 years, almost to the day, before the dissolution of the atheist Union on 26 December 1991. What happened on that fatal day, or rather, night in 1916?

1916-2016 and the Resurrection of the Christian Empire

30 December 1916 was the night when Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy was assassinated by British spies with the aid of Russian aristocrats. He was the ‘Friend’ of the Imperial Family, an elder gifted and sent by God, but used as a scapegoat by the aristocracy to discredit the Family because he was a simple Orthodox peasant, not one of them. He was slandered by Soviet atheists, decadent Russian émigrés, and the Western Establishment alike. Why? Because their values are all identical in their hostility to Incarnate Christianity.

Thus, I remember in the 1980s hearing the disgraceful and slanderous opinion of a priest (later a bishop) in the Paris emigration about Bishop Theophan of Poltava and Gregory Rasputin. In reality, only when Gregory’s murder is acknowledged and his role representing the faithful Russian people is recognized will justice be done. His murder was the first in the coup d’etat which led to the murder not only of the Imperial Family, but to the murder of millions, the attempt to murder Civilization, to murder the Christian Empire.

This murder was carried out by the Anglo-Zionist Empire (2), founded in 1916 by the internationalist politician Lord Milner, who wrote the Balfour Declaration, Lloyd-George, and bankers like the Morgans and the Warburgs. This Anglo-Zionist Empire has reigned for 100 years. All this time we have been seeking the resurrection of the Christian Empire. But this can only come with repentance for the treason of 1916 and 1917 and the 100-year nightmare that followed. Only when that repentance has taken place, can restoration begin.

Conclusion: Where Do We Come From – Where Are We Going?

When faced with this question, my answer is always ‘from far away’. For we come from White Russia, from Holy Rus, from the Christian Empire. We are the Tsar’s people. We have not chosen the alternative to this, the Anglo-Zionist Empire, now centred in Washington and spreading its tentacles through the UN, the EU, NATO and a host of vassal states and organizations worldwide. All that is the dying past and we have chosen the future, the Coming Christian Empire. It is what we are single-mindedly marching towards, our only destiny.

Notes:

1. For Anna Vyrubova’s memoirs in English about the Elder Gregory Rasputin and his slanderers, see:
http://www.alexanderpalace.org/russiancourt2006/xi.html

2. This term ‘Anglo-Zionist Empire’ was first used by another, like myself also a spiritual child of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the Russo-Dutch political blogger known as ‘The Saker’. We also use this term because it sums up perfectly the imperialist exclusivism of the British Lloyd-George, Balfour, the ambassador Buchanan and the Anglo-German Lord Milner, anti-English but pro-British, all members of the secretive organization ‘The Round Table’. Milner had been responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the British concentration camps of the Boer War, a ruthless war all about gold and diamonds. With his bankster and industrialist allies in New York, for example Crane, Morgan, the German-born Kuhn Loeb, Schiff and the Warburgs, the half-German Milner founded the century of supremacy of the transnational Anglosphere, in 1916 transferring its centre from London to New York. This clique had a more or less Hitlerian belief in the racial superiority of the English-speaking world, backed by Jewish finance (hence ‘Anglo-Zionist’), and had no patriotic loyalty, but loyalty only to global finance. Today they would have been called ‘neocons’. Some, for example the German General Ludendorff, have suggested that this clique was responsible for the death of the patriotic Lord Kitchener, the much slandered lover of England and Russia, in June 1916. Certainly Lloyd-George and Milner profited hugely from his death.

Christ the Invincible Power

Answers to Questions from Recent Conversations and Correspondence

Q: When did you first become conscious of the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: My introduction to the Orthodox Church was through the local saints of England in my native north Essex, notably St Edmund, but also St Albright (Ethelbert), St Cedd, St Botolph and St Osyth. However, as regards the Russian Orthodox Church as such, my first encounter was almost fifty years ago, just after my 12th birthday, in August 1968. As a result of that revelation, I began teaching myself Russian in October of that year in Colchester because I already knew that the Russian Orthodox Church is my spiritual home. However, I had to wait nearly another seven years until I could take part in Russian Orthodox life, as in those days (it is not much better now) there were so few Russian churches anywhere. I only managed to visit any Russian churches in 1973.

Q: Which part of the Russian Church did you join?

A: Having been told by two of its members that the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) would not allow me to join it because I was English (I had no idea at that time that my great-grandmother was Russian, I only discovered that distant link much later), I had no alternative but to join the Moscow Patriarchate. They may have been many things in those distant days, but at least they were not racists.

Q: What was your path to the priesthood after that?

A: A very hard one. First of all, since I could not live and work in Russia on account of the Cold War at that time, for my first job I went to live and work in Greece. I thought that was the next best alternative. After a year there and visiting the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, I understood that the Balkan Churches were no solution to the need for a Local Orthodox Church in the West. They were all inward-looking, culturally very narrow and hopelessly nationalistic. Later, contacts with Romanians and Georgians told me the same about them and in the Romanian case there is the huge problem of simony. So, with Russia closed off, in 1979 with the blessing of Metr Antony (Bloom) I went to study at the St Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, which I had in my ignorance imagined to be a Russian Orthodox seminary.

Q: What was it in fact?

A: It was the remains of a Russian Orthodox seminary mingled with an institute of philosophy and, frankly, of heresy. It openly preached modernism or Renovationism, which is Protestant-based, and is therefore not even remotely interesting to someone coming from a country like England with a Protestant culture, so alien to me. One English priest, rather harshly, called St Serge a Methodist Sunday School. Very harsh, but there was some truth in it.

Q: Why did you not think of going to Jordanville in the USA?

A: For the same reason as before. I was repeatedly told by members of ROCOR that they only took Russians. Remember in those days there was no internet, no advice, you had to make your own way, you went by what local representatives told you, even if it was incorrect.

Q: What happened next?

A: In 1982 I was offered the priesthood by the Moscow Patriarchate on terms which I can only describe as scandalous. I walked out, never to return, and enquired again at the Church Outside Russia. I got the same answer as in 1974, though I noted that this time there were actually a few ex-Anglicans in a separate branch of ROCOR in England. However, these rather eccentric conservative Anglicans seemed to have no interest in the Russian Orthodox Church, but only in being anti-Anglican and they had a huge interest in fanatical Greek Orthodox sects. Never having been Anglican and having lived in Greece, I had no interest in either. This was all the more frustrating since ROCOR had just canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors and naturally I had their icons and venerated them. Nevertheless, in 1983, I decided to emigrate to France and join my wife’s jurisdiction, the Paris Jurisdiction.

Q: Wasn’t that foolhardy? I mean you already knew about the problem of modernism there?

A: What you have to understand is that in Paris in 1981 they had elected a new Archbishop. Under the very elderly and saintly old one, renovationists had come to the fore, taking advantage of his old age, but the new Archbishop promised us personally that he would sweep them away and return his jurisdiction to Orthodoxy and canonical Russian practice. So this was a time of great promise and even excitement. Patriarch Dimitrios of Constantinople even said at the time that the Paris Jurisdiction would be returned to the Russian Church as soon as it was free. So, with hope in a promising future, in January 1985 I was ordained deacon there.

Q: What happened next?

A: in May 1985 I was offered the priesthood providing that I would become a freemason. I refused, scandalized. Then we became witnesses to the complete takeover of the jurisdiction by renovationists. The new Archbishop ordained them one by one, completely breaking his promise – not because he was a liar, but because he was weak. It was the same problem as Metr Evlogy, the first Paris Jurisdiction ruling bishop; he had never wanted to leave the Russian Church, but he was a weak man surrounded by powerful laymen, mainly freemasons and those who had betrayed the Tsar and organized the February Revolution. It was the end of the possibility that that jurisdiction would ever return to the freed, restored and reunited Russian Church. But I only understood that the meaning of that bitter disappointment afterwards.

Q: Why did you not leave such a masonic group?

A: Not all by far were freemasons and I felt that I had to labour on until God’s will for me should be revealed.

Q: When was that?

A: Without doubt it was in summer 1988 when the Paris Jurisdiction celebrated the millennium of the Baptism of Rus. Instead of inviting the Russian bishops in Western Europe to the Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and returning to the Russian Church in unity, they railed against the Russian Church and invited the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Paris. I was not only scandalized but spiritually distraught. I was an eyewitness to treason and apostasy. It was the last straw. They preferred heresy to Orthodoxy.

Soon after, I met Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, who told me that he would be happy to receive me and that I had no need whatsoever to labour on in such anti-canonical conditions. I jumped at the opportunity. 17 people left with me, including a priest. So we all joined the Church Outside Russia in January 1989. That was a transforming moment because previously I had only known the Church Outside Russia in England. On the other hand, Vladyka Antony, heir to Vladyka John of Shanghai, though traditional, was not racist or fanatical, but missionary-minded. He lived in a different world from the fanatics in England and we freely concelebrated with other Orthodox.

I remember him telling me about the extremists who were trying to take control of ROCOR in New York. He said: ‘But there’s nowhere else to go’. I have not the slightest doubt that he would have returned to Russia, if he had had the chance. I also remember conversations with him about Metr Antony of Kiev (Archbp Antony came from Kiev), whom he had known well in Belgrade and whose name he had taken. He was the real ROCOR. Real Russian Orthodox. At last. It had taken me 20 years to get to that point! 20 years of facing illusions, lies, broken promises and corruption. You would think it would have been easy, but nothing of the sort. All hell was against the Russian Orthodox Church, a sure sign of truth.

Q: What happened next?

A: Well, I was at last living as a proper Russian Orthodox. Nearly three years later, in December 1991 I was ordained priest for the new ROCOR parish in Lisbon in Portugal.

Q: What was your attitude to the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: We were all just impatiently waiting for it to become politically free and free of renovationism. That happened officially with the Jubilee Council in Moscow in 2000.

Q: So why didn’t the Church Outside Russia join up with the Patriarchate straightaway in 2000?

A: It is one thing to proclaim the truth at a Council, but another for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. For example, after that I can still remember how at the London Patriarchal Cathedral they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs and also, incidentally, they refused to sell the books of Fr Seraphim (Rose) or anything traditional. Priests and people coming from Russia were persecuted by the renovationists because they were ‘too’ traditional. We had to wait for the Patriarchate to free itself from such Renovationism.

Also, it must be said, we had to wait until the fanatical elements that had done so much harm to ROCOR since they had started infiltrating the Church in the mid-sixties had left us. When the extremists did finally leave, almost at the same time, there was a huge sigh of relief, because then we could get on with being Orthodox. So it was we had to wait until 2007.

Q: How do you know that people are free of Renovationism?

A: Easy: The yardstick is veneration for the New Martyrs, especially the Imperial Martyrs. The renovationists hate them.

Q: How do you know that people are free of sectarian fanaticism of the sort you describe as having infiltrated ROCOR?

A: Easy: The yardstick is the willingness to concelebrate with other Orthodox Christians.

Q: What is going to happen in the future? At present there are countries like England where there are two parallel jurisdictions of the Russian Church, one dependent on Moscow, the other dependent on the Church Outside Russia?

A: According to the 2007 agreement, where there are two parallel jurisdictions, ROCOR should, in time, absorb the Patriarchal jurisdiction. This will probably take a generation, so that no-one will be under any pressure and everything will take place naturally, organically. However, in reality, already nine years have passed and we can see that in certain areas, like North America and Australasia, ROCOR will indeed clearly take over responsibility for those territories, whereas in other areas the Patriarchate will take over, as in South America, not to mention South-East Asia. The problem comes in the mixed area of Western Europe, including the British Isles and Ireland. In this area, only time will tell, clearly it is the more competent of the two that will take responsibility.

For the moment we shall lead parallel lives. There is in any case so much to do. I could start 12 parishes tomorrow, if I had the money to buy buildings and get candidates for the priesthood ordained. The state of Orthodox infrastructure and the general pastoral situation here are so appalling as to be scandalous; no wonder so many Orthodox lapse or become Roman Catholic or Protestant. All we pastors meet with is indifference. Those in authority should hang their heads in shame. Why is there not a church, our own property in every town over 100,000? This should have been done a generation ago. For example the teeming millions of London only have two small churches!

Colchester is the 50th largest town in England (and incidentally the 500th largest in Western Europe). It has a church that belongs to us. But want about the other 49 larger ones? Only five of them have their own churches: London, Manchester, Nottingham, Norwich, Birkenhead-Liverpool. That is a scandal. There is no missionary vision at all. Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK with a population of two million. And where do the faithful of the Patriarchate have ten liturgies a year on Saturdays (that’s all the priest can manage)? In the Ukrainian Uniat chapel. The next time you hear some naïve Orthodox boasting about his Church, tell him that. Orthodox should be ashamed of themselves.

Q: So is there competition between the two parts of the Russian Church locally?

A: No, not at all. It all depends on who has the priests and the buildings. A concrete example. I was asked to visit a prison in Cambridgeshire. Now, since there is no ROCOR presence in Cambridgeshire (because through incompetence it refused to set anything up there in the 1980s), I gave the prison authorities the references of the Patriarchal priest who lives in Cambridgeshire. On the other hand, when there was question of the Patriarchate setting something up in Norfolk (it had lost what it had had there a few years before, also through incompetence), but knowing that ROCOR had a presence there dating back to 1966, it was referred to me. So here is a territorial division. Now, where there is a double jurisdiction, as in London (the only case), something will have to be sorted out. But, as you can see, that will be as a result of competence. Only time can settle such matters. The more competent part, the more spiritual part of the Russian Church will prevail and form a united jurisdiction.

Q: So there is no rigid territorial division in Western Europe?

A: No, nobody wants to impose such a system. Let everything be done freely, let the people choose. Though, having said that, we can observe a tendency for ROCOR to dominate in the English-speaking world. Canada, the USA and Australasia are clear examples. For example, with Archbishop Mark of ROCOR retiring to Germany and the ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland being taken over by Metr Hilarion of New York, we can even talk about a sort of ROCOR Brexit. Metr Hilarion will in fact be Metropolitan of New England and Old England. That is an exceptional event, historically speaking, and may be significant, a turning-point.

So it is possible that in a generation from now ROCOR will only exist in the English-speaking world, but will unite all Russian Orthodox there. ROCOR will become ROCA – the Russian Orthodox Church in the Anglosphere. That is one quite organic and natural possible scenario, a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia for the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world. The Patriarchate will look after everything else in various Metropolias, in Latin America, in Alaska, in Western Europe, in Asia etc.

Q: So Western Europe would completely go to the Patriarchate?

A: That is the way that things are developing at the moment. All the young bishops and all the dynamism in the Russian Church there is Patriarchal. ROCOR only has three ageing bishops and is not opening any new churches.

Q: Is there a difference between ROCOR churches and Patriarchal churches?

A: I think there is a small one, in general. Strangely enough, ROCOR is at one and the same time more Russian, but also more local, more integrated. We have done the translations, we print in English, we speak the local languages and know the local laws, we were born here. At the same time, however, we are utterly faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia, never having endured the Soviet period and Renovationism. ‘To quote the saintly Metr Laurus: ‘We are for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. We are Imperial priests and people.

Q: What about your own relations with the Russian Church inside Russia?

A: We are very close to all those who are Churched in Russia and they feel close to us. For example, in Moscow one of the closest friends of ROCOR has always been Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), whom some have even suggested will be the next Patriarch. (Bp Tikhon has been in the news recently, since he outraged the British Establishment by inviting students from Eton College to experience Christianity in Russia; not something the atheist Establishment likes). In general, those who especially venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors at once feel at home in ROCOR. I have this nearly every Sunday. People from different parts of Russia, from the Ukraine, from Moldova and elsewhere say that they feel at home, whatever the language, the atmosphere is like at home. In my native town of Colchester, that is a great thing that we have such an oasis of Orthodoxy.

Q: Who are the unChurched in Russia?

A: You find all sorts of people. There are those on the right hand side who mingle superstition with Orthodoxy, for instance, those ritualists who think that holy water is more important than holy communion, who mix in pharisaic sectarianism, puritanism and judgementalism, or, on the other hand, those on the left hand side, who mix in Soviet nationalism, love of the tyrant Stalin, or modernism. But all that is superficial, the majority make their way to the Church sooner or later. You do not waste time on the convert fringes of the Church – otherwise you might end up thinking that that is the Church! A terrible delusion!

Q: Why have you stayed faithful to the Russian Church despite all the difficulties that you have faced over nearly fifty years?

A: Because the Russian Orthodox Church is the Invincible Power. History since 1917 proves it. The gates of hell have not prevailed – and shall not prevail – despite all the enemies and traitors, both external and internal, we have faced. Judas betrayed, but the other apostles triumphed. So tragedy becomes joy. The stone that was rejected is become the headstone of the corner. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

1916-2016: 100 Years of Saints and Traitors

Introduction

100 years ago there began the last stages in the greatest injustice in world history – the betrayal of Imperial Christian Russia. Then on the point of victory in the First World War and so of liberating New Rome, called Constantinople, and also the Holy Land, it was also about to liberate the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, so undoing the injustices in Central Europe and the Balkans and in the tyrannical Second Reich of Bismarck, so reconstituting a free Poland, and perhaps also righting the injustices of Western colonization worldwide. Had it not been betrayed, there would never have been any Bolshevik genocide (millions of dead), no Third Reich and no Hitler, no World War Two, no Teutonic holocaust of the Slavs (30 million dead) or of the Jews (over 5 million dead), no American fire bombs and atom bombs on Japanese civilians (1 million dead?), no Communist China (30 million dead?), no abortion holocaust (100 million dead?), no……

In May 1945 one Russian soldier – he later became a priest – was standing in the ruined Reichstag in Berlin. Surrounded by incredible destruction, but also great relief, victory had come at a huge price on the Russian Easter Day, which that year had coincided with the day of the feast of St George the Victorious Soldier-Martyr. There, in the Reichstag, the soldier saw Tsar Nicholas II surveying the scene, examining every detail, thinking that in 1917 he would already have stood there, surrounded however not by destruction but by an intact capital of culture. The ghost of Tsar Nicholas has haunted Europe ever since it betrayed him in 1917. He has been here all the time, to this very day, looking with eyes of pity at the merciless destruction and self-destruction of the Western world, as it sinks into its self-made abyss. Betrayed at the last moment in 1917, according to a plot prepared in detail in 1916, he looks on the lost souls and cultural heritage of the Western world and his heart weeps.

Inside Russia

The first sign that the plot had been implemented was the assassination of the peasant-healer Rasputin in December 1916, betrayed by decadent Russian aristocrats, who hated the Christian peasantry, and murdered by British spies, who hated Russian Orthodox. Financed by its enemies (Germany and Austro-Hungary) and by its ‘allies’ (Britain, France and the US, who had already financed Japan’s transformation into militarism and its murderous attack on Russia in 1904), sabotage and treason laid the Tsar’s Russia low. In 1917 this developed into anarchy (the so-called ‘Revolution’), which was created by ‘liberal’ opportunist traitors in February and exploited by ‘Bolshevik’ opportunist traitors in October. Anarchy (falsely called ‘Revolution’) was fabricated in the salons of the jealous and the ignoble, grand dukes and princes, generals and politicians, freemasons and lawyers, industrialists and bourgeois – ‘have money, want power’ – traitors to the people and their Tsar.

All of them were utterly unfaithful to the three (three because Trinitarian) tenets and principles that had upheld the Christian Empire of the Tsar. These were: the Faith (uncompromised Orthodox Christianity); the Tsar (the Anointed Christian Sovereign); and Rus (the multinational Christian Empire). As atheists and apostates, they committed sabotage and treason with regard to all these values, which represent Faith in the Father, the Incarnation of the Son and the Presence of the Holy Spirit. Those who remained faithful to these three tenets inside Russia were the New Martyrs and Confessors and those who venerated them. The salt of the earth, they were the ones who were to begin the great restoration that has been under way since the official fall of Bolshevism twenty-five years ago, but in fact long before, from the moment of their exploits. Thus the traitors were countered by the saints and, although the traitors still do not understand how or why, the saints always win.

Outside Russia

After the anarchy, there began the resistance and then the defeat and so emigration of those known as ‘White Russians’. Once in the emigration (though even before), it could plainly be seen that here too there were saints and traitors. To the left hand side there fell away those who betrayed the Faith and the Tsar. To the right hand side there fell away those who betrayed the Faith and Rus. On the left hand side were the renovationists, who so hated the Russian Church that they left Her, compromising Her Faith, and so hated the Tsar that they actually justified their treason, which had led them into the self-punishment of exile. On the right hand side were the nationalists, who so hated the Russian Church that they made Her into a narrow nationalist flag, forgetting Her multinational mission, and so hated Rus that they allied themselves with its crazed Teutonic enemy, not understanding that the victory of 1945 was the people’s victory, the victory of repentant Rus.

There were also those who understood that the task of the emigration was to keep faith with all three tenets. We knew that as long as all three principles were respected, all would be well and it would be simple to reunite with Russia once it was free again and restoration had begun, with the New Martyrs and Confessors officially venerated there. We understood that the Faith could not be compromised by heresies, dreamy and disincarnate renovationism and personality cults, regardless of the fact that we lived outside Russia. We understood that the memory of the Tsar, the universal Christian Emperor, had to be kept for restoration, in order for a new Christian Emperor to come and oppose the worldwide evil that has been unleashed ever since Tsar Nicholas was deposed. We understood that our mission is to make Rus universal, worldwide, regardless of race and language, and that our mission is among the people and must not be compromised by political Establishments.

Conclusion

In our own times we are seeing a daily miracle: over the last 25 years we have seen in the Russian Lands what we and those before us had been praying for over the previous 75 years, the slow restoration of the Tsar’s Christian Russia. Yes, it has been a slow and tortuous process, with many hesitations, deviations and falls, but the general direction has been right. This process of restoration is of course far from over, indeed, in many respects it has only just begun, but the icons of the New Martyrs, including those of the Royal Martyrs, are everywhere. As the new Cold War NATO occupies the Ukraine and Estonia, attempting to destabilize governments from Macedonia to Moldova and Armenia to Kazakhstan, and prepares to attack all along the Russian borders, its aircraft and submarines, tanks and troops everywhere threatening resurgent Russia, the last bastion of Christianity in the world, we see the desperation of the world’s elite in its bid to impose its New World Order.

Having destabilized all Latin America and much of Africa, striving to undermine China and India and using tides of poor Muslim immigrants to threaten European identities, having destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria, and attempting to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church and Faith, the satanic New World Order’s proposed Orthodox Council has led only to our clear identification of the unrepentant traitors in our midst – by waiting for them to reveal themselves, we now know who is ready for cleansing. The tiny but immensely powerful elite that stands behind the USA, the EU, NATO, the whole Western world indeed, and pulls the strings of its media, puppets and all the deceived and gullible, knows that if Russia resists it successfully, its aim of global domination and control will be foiled and the coming of the Kingdom of the Great Deceiver, Antichrist, that it knowingly and unknowingly seeks will be postponed, perhaps even for many years to come. May it be so, O Lord.

Russian Orthodox Church also to Abandon Crete Meeting?

The news that the Bulgarian Orthodox Church will not be taking part in what was supposed to be a ‘Pan-Orthodox’ meeting in Crete this month, because it disagrees with the draft documents proposed (like most Orthodox everywhere), and that the Patriarchate of Antioch will probably not take part, was followed by an announcement of the Synod of the Russian Church on 3 June.

This was a call for an extraordinary ‘pre-Conciliar’ conference to take place before the 10 June in order to iron out the mass of methodological problems and problems of syncretism in the documents – if not the Russian Church will not take part. (Metr Agafangel of Odessa has already refused personally to take part in the Russian delegation because he disagrees so profoundly with the documents proposed).

However, yesterday, on 6 June, the Patriarchate of Constantinople completely rejected this proposal, thus ensuring that the Russian Church will not take part. It is clear that Constantinople’s arrogant, top-down attempt to impose on the Orthodox world and people its syncretistic and anti-Orthodox views, dictated to it by the US State Department, has failed.

On 28 May the well-known Russian Orthodox layman and prominent businessman, Konstantin Malofeev, speaking on the Tsargrad TV Channel, confirmed what we had all along suspected. This is that the venue for the Crete meeting is full of CIA and FBI agents, who have been called in ‘to ensure the security of the Orthodox bishops against terrorism’’. In fact, they are bugging the venue and in fact will control all its proceedings.

In other words, if a meeting is to take place, it must first of all take place with a list of real problems of the Church – e.g. the divisive and politically-enforced introduction among a few Orthodox of the Catholic calendar for the fixed feasts, the invasion of Russian canonical territory in Finland, Estonia and elsewhere by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and ending the jurisdictional divisions in the Diaspora caused by the Patriarchate of Constantinople after 1917.

Secondly, such a meeting must take place with Patriarchs freely chosen by the Synods of the Local Churches (and not in a back room in the US State Department) and it must take place in a free country, in the absence of spies. For nine years now we have been suggesting the now fully restored New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. Perhaps there a meeting could be held which would become a real Pan-Orthodox Council rather than a farcical and expensive junket.

The Imperial Orthodox Faithful

A generation on after the fall of the atheist government in the Soviet Union, the Russian Church has made extraordinary progress in rebuilding and restoring itself. However, as we have frequently written: as it took three generations to destroy Imperial Russia, so it will take three generations to restore Her and even longer to do better, only thus ensuring that the atheist nightmare can never be repeated. The atheists produced a country where all ideals, ambitions and hopes were destroyed and so male alcoholism and female abortion were both normal. Although the statistics show dramatic improvements in these areas, the country is still paying a very heavy price, as can be seen from the still relatively low life expectancy and demography. As for church-building, what has been done is remarkable, but we cannot be satisfied – at least another 100,000 churches are required and another 100,000 priests – and that is only in the historic Russian Lands, let alone in the many lands of mission for the Church worldwide. We have no illusions, we have very far to go in order to gather in the peoples before the now rapidly approaching end.

As ever, the Church, not of the world, but still in the world, is squeezed between two opposing tendencies, the two sides of the same superficial coin. On the one hand, there are the spiritually superficial and primitive, but intellectually sophisticated, the disincarnate dreamers and ‘heaven-dwellers’, liberals and ecumenists, philosophers in prelest and mantra-repeating name-worshippers, left-wing renovationists and modernists, Parisians and Kochetkovites, who love each other, new suicidal Gapons, essentially rationalistic Protestants, who are clearly not of this world, but neither are they at all, as they deludedly imagine they are, of the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, there are equally spiritually superficial and primitive, but materially sophisticated, the worldly State-worshippers, pro-Stalinists, anti-Semites (yes 90% of the Bolshevik leaders were atheist Jews, but it was baptised but unChurched Russians and an apostate Georgian seminarist who obeyed their Satanic orders), ritualists (both Old and New Ritualists), fanatics, narrow sectarians, pharisees, superstitious and nominal, golden dome and gilt worshippers, who do not know that making the sign of the cross and sprinkling yourself with holy water before you sin does not bless that sin.

In the middle stands the Church, ever crucified and ever resurrected, not of this world, with the saints and martyrs in heaven and on earth, but committed to sanctifying this world and transfiguring State values into Church values, the balance kept by parish and monastic life together, both vital to any healthy Church, as we saw already in the fourth century and again in the nineteenth century. Carried by women for 90% of the time, the Church has yet to reach out to men and Church them. Too much is about attachment to externals, the reduction of the Faith to rituals, to putting the flesh above the spirit. Such superficiality is always followed by nemesis, the result of refusing Divine Protection and choosing human foolishness. The invasion of Kievan Rus by the barbaric Mongols and of Rus by the even more barbaric Teutonic Knights some 800 years ago, the Polish Invasion just over 400 years ago, Napoleon’s invasion just over 200 years ago, the so-called ‘Revolution’ nearly 100 years ago, Hitler’s invasion 75 years ago and the invasion of the Ukraine two years ago and the US-appointed junta in Kiev, all witness to the results of a merely superficial Orthodoxy.

For the way ahead we need to look to the best of Russian Orthodoxy, spiritual but also incarnate. This has always followed three (three because Trinitarian) tenets. These are: firstly, the Orthodox Faith in her integrity, so without the compromises that have befallen the modernists and ecumenists, who follow the secularist Western world and not the Gospel of Christ; secondly, the Imperial ideal, incarnate before the February 1917 coup d’etat of aristocratic Duma masons and treasonous generals, today only hinted at in prophetic gleams and shafts of light, but eagerly awaited in the coming Tsar; and thirdly, the Orthodox people, of all races and tongues all over the world, inside the Russian Lands and outside the Russian Lands, all spiritually united by and owing spiritual allegiance to Holy Rus’, the Christian Empire. We are the Orthodox Imperial Faithful, we are the Church, sinners but repentant, strict because faithful, but open because we know about human weaknesses. May God forgive us and lead us to victory before the end.

About Ionan Orthodoxy: An Interview with Archbishop George of London

12 May 2041

Q: What is the territory of your Archdiocese?

AG: As you know, our Archdiocese is part of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe under Metropolitan John. This stretches from Ireland to Austria and Iceland to Sicily and includes the Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Basque peoples of Western Europe. Our Archdiocese includes the four now sovereign nations of England, Ireland (which was finally reunited five years ago, if you remember), Scotland and Wales. At present we have four bishops, myself, Bishop Patrick in Dublin, Bishop Andrew in Edinburgh and Bishop David in Cardiff. For our Local Synods we always use our premises on the Isle of Man, the only place from which all our four nations are visible.

Q: Why did you take the name Ionan for your Archdiocese?

AG: Originally, the name ‘Diocese of the Isles’ was suggested for the Archdiocese, but this was considered too vague, since there are isles all over the world. Then the name ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’ was suggested, so forming the acronym I.O.N.A. This conveniently refers to the Ionan Orthodox monasticism of St Columba, which originated in Egypt and came to Ireland via Gaul. Since St Columba’s monastery on Iona spread to England via Lindisfarne and from there Orthodoxy went south, converting much of England, and authentic monasticism had always been the one thing missing here, we felt that this was a good name.

Q: How did ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ come into being?

AG: As you know even into the early 21st century there were two forms of Orthodoxy in Western countries. The first was that which looked back to the ethnic homeland, which meant that in each Western European country there was a multitude of dioceses, called jurisdictions, each living in a sort of divisive ethnic ghetto and using mainly a language other than English. This was all right for first-generation immigrants, but it did not work for second and subsequent generations, who were simply assimilated into the Non-Orthodox milieu. And after three generations, 75 years, abroad, the first generation always died out and so the Church with it. It happened to the Russians in England (arrived by 1920) who had died out by 1995 and to the Greek-Cypriots in England (arrived by 1960) who had died out by 2035.

Q: What was the second form of Orthodoxy in the West?

AG: Seeing the obvious short-sightedness and failure of the above form, there were second and third-generation Russian intellectuals who by reaction took the opposite stance. Their second form of Orthodoxy consisted of merging all Orthodox, whatever their background, into a melting pot. Their common point was the lowest common denominator, that is, the ethnic identity of the (Non-Orthodox) host country. Their policy was then to sell this as the new and substitute ethnic identity of a new Local Church. This second form only developed in full in North America, where immigrants had begun arriving much earlier than in Western Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century, and where people were far more cut off from the roots of Orthodoxy than in Europe. In Europe we did not want to repeat that mistake.

Q: What was that mistake?

AG: It was the attempt to create an ‘American Orthodoxy’. That was a mistake because it put a culture, Non-Orthodox at that, above the Church. This was not a theological movement, but merely a sociological movement of adaptation and conformism. For example, through the inferiority complex of immigrants, most Orthodox churches in the US adopted pews and many of them organs, one institution tried to use a guitar accompaniment to the Divine Liturgy and adapt the theme tune of the cowboy film ‘Shenandoah’ to it. In other places the Divine Liturgy would be stopped at Christmas in order to sing Protestant Christmas carols!

Someone at the time drew a cartoon of an ‘All-American Patriarch’, a clean-shaven man in a clerical collar with a foolish grin on his face and a glass of coca-cola in his hand, like an advert for toothpaste. Of course, this was only a carton, but it did sum up the situation. At that time when the USA still ruled the world, there were actually individuals in the US who arrogantly and blindly imagined that this second form of Orthodoxy there was the only true form of Orthodoxy, that it was at the centre of the world and that it was their duty to colonize the rest of the world with it! In reality, of course, it was a mere provincial backwater experiment, to be allowed to die out quietly because this experiment simply pandered to the weaknesses of the host country. It placed the Church of God below heretical culture. That was blasphemous, which is why it was racked with scandals.

Q: But did the same temptation not occur in Europe, even if it did not have time to develop to the same extent as in the USA?

AG: Yes, of course, it occurred; human nature is the same everywhere, it was just that it took on different forms according to the local heterodox culture. The same thing has happened among unChurched, semi-Orthodox people in Greece, Romania and Russia. It is simply the heresy of phyletism. And make no mistake, it is a heresy because you can lose your soul in it – that is what a heresy is.

For example, in France a whole jurisdiction catered for a kind of ‘philosophical and aesthetic Orthodoxy’, ‘l’Orthodoxie a la francaise’, as one might say. This theory of Orthodoxy, or theorizing about Orthodoxy, did not present the Church as the Christian way of life, but as a complex and highly intellectual philosophy, full of long words and isms, which no-one really understood. Of course, it could have been expressed in very simple language, which everyone knew already. But as long as it sounded theoretically and philosophically fine, ‘cosmique’ as they used to say, all was fine, but of course, it was not fine and that jurisdiction died out, as it was built on sand, not on the Rock of the Faith. This theorizing was about the god of the philosophers in the language of philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the language of the fishermen of Galilee. You simply cannot build a Local Church based on Non-Orthodox culture! That is common sense, but you could not say that out loud to those who were taken up by such delusions.

Q: What about in other countries in Europe?

AG: It happened everywhere, not just in France. For example, in Germany the first liturgical book to be translated was the Typikon. In other words, Orthodoxy there was confused with the Non-Orthodox German mindset and produced an Orthodoxy of rules, a stubborn, black and white system, without any flexibility, any understanding of the human component, which is what it is all about. They lost their way by confusing the means (the services) with the ends (the salvation of the soul). For instance, I remember one German priest refusing to give a woman communion because she was dressed in trousers. Well, she was of course wrong, but a few decades ago there was a fashion for women to dress in trousers (fortunately, long since over now). That was bad, but what right did the German priest have to excommunicate that woman? Suppose she had died in the night after she had been refused communion? That sin would have been on the conscience of that priest.

Q: And in England?

AG: It was the same thing again. The national weakness here was not theorizing or creating a book of rules, but it was to adapt Orthodoxy to the British Establishment, to create a compromised ‘Establishment Orthodoxy’, a ‘British Orthodoxy’. This State-controlled and State-worshipping Orthodoxy, that of converts from Anglicanism, was of course just a repeat of the Anglicanism that had long ago been invented by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. There were even two whole but tiny jurisdictions dedicated to this State-approved pietism. It was all salt that had lost its savour. Some such people used the treacherous, half-Norman Edward the Confessor as the mascot of their ‘Establishment Orthodoxy’. Of course, it all came to nothing and has died out now, largely a fantasy of the late-twentieth century and the curious personalities who reigned supreme in the bad old days then. It was very oppressive because, as they were emperors in new clothes, you were not allowed to contradict them!

All these examples show the danger of compromising the Faith with local culture. And all those who did so have now died out, as withered branches. And that is the answer to your question, how did ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ come into being. It came into being as the only living alternative to the two false alternatives – the ghetto or worldly compromise.

Q: So what do you base ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ on?

AG: Simply, we put the Church and the Faith first. If we put the Kingdom of God, Orthodoxy, first, then all will fall into place, including the language that we use in services, which today is for about 90% in English, regardless of the ethnic origin of the parishioners, regardless of how well or how badly they speak another language. We are united by Orthodox Christianity, not by ethnic origins, and we are carried forward by the faithfulness to the Church and Her Tradition of the younger generations, who are all primarily English-speakers.

Q: You now have over 350 parishes in the British Isles and Ireland, all established quite solidly and with their own clergy and premises. Every city and town over 50,000 and the area around it is covered. This is quite unlike even 25 years ago, when the Russian Church, a small minority at that time, had mostly tiny communities with services once a month, borrowed premises and a suffered from a huge shortage of priests to go out and do vital missionary work in the area surrounding their churches. What about the other jurisdictions, which collectively still have over 50 parishes outside the Archdiocese?

AG: We live with them as good neighbours. People are free to join us and free to remain outside us. As you know, the parishes outside our jurisdiction are composed mainly of elderly people who settled here from various countries 50 years ago or more and they use very little English in their services. Virtually all the young people come to us. Time will show which way things will go. Live and let live.

Q: What is the future? Do you think of autocephaly?

AG: The Western European Metropolia, with just over 2,000 parishes now, is united, with six archdioceses, Iona, Scandinavia, Germania, Gallia, Italia and Hispania. True, the Metropolia has autonomy, but at the present time there is no desire at all for autocephaly. True, 2,000 parishes is more than in some other Local Churches, like the 700 parishes of the Hungarian Orthodox Church which recently became autocephalous, but a lot fewer than in others. Take China for example. That is still also an autonomous part of the Russian Church, even though it now has over 25,000 parishes. And the Russian Church Herself did not become autonomous for centuries, only after the Empire had fallen in New Rome. At present, I cannot see any reason to become autocephalous. That situation may of course change, especially in China, but not yet. It all takes time.

Q: Are you saying that autocephaly granted prematurely can be dangerous?

AG: Definitely. And especially in Western Europe.

Q: Why?

AG: Because Western Europe has for over a millennium veered between extremes which we do not want to repeat.

Q: Which extremes?

AG: The first is that of despotic centralism. This was the extreme of the pagan Roman Empire, which Charlemagne foolishly tried to revive and fortunately failed to, but it was indeed revived after 1050, causing Western Europe’s schism from the Church, and that lasted until the anti-Latin nationalist outburst of the Germanic Reformation. After that, despotic centralism was tried again by warmongers like Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, and then by the EU Fourth Reich – and we all know how that ended.

Each time there was a reaction to this despotism – nationalism, and that led to terrible fratricidal wars in Europe, like the so-called ‘Wars of Religion’ in the 16th century, just as centralism created the World Wars. We do not want those extremes, we must follow the golden mean of unity in diversity, which is what we have in Ionan Orthodoxy and in the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe in general. Europe has to be a Confederation of Nations, not a Union, a United States of Europe, but not a series of warring, nationalist states either.

In the same way, the Tsardom of Rus, as it is now called, successfully overcame provincial Ukrainian nationalism a generation ago and reunited huge territories, one sixth of the world. However, it only did this by rejecting the old centralism of the Soviet Union, which had done so much damage to its credibility. Once it had done that, again on the basis of unity in diversity, all of Eastern Europe joined in a free and mutually beneficial economic confederation with it, throwing off the shackles of the old European Union, which was in fact just a repeat of the Soviet Union.

Q: Will you drop the word ‘Russian’ from the name of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe? Most of your faithful are either not Russian or else do not speak it.

AG: In the bad old days of Western nationalism, for example in North America in the Cold War, they detested the word ‘Russian’ and dropped it. Now we are more enlightened and we all understand that ‘Russian’ does not mean nationalism and means uncompromised, unsecularized Orthodoxy. We exist because we have been helped to exist by the Russian Orthodox Church, the only multinational, Imperial Orthodox Church. I think we should keep it. Do you remember the old Roman Catholic Church, as it used to be called? Well, there were hardly any Romans in it!

Q: Why has the Western European Metropolia been so successful?

AG: Without doubt because of the sacrifices made to underpin it in the twentieth century and since. The Church is built on blood, sweat and tears. We should remember with gratitude the prayers and work of those who went before us. For example, I can remember decades ago, how people wanted more English in the services. So, one bishop said yes, do the service in English. What happened? The people who had been clamouring for more English could not even put a decent choir together to sing just the Liturgy! Some of them said that the singing was so bad that they preferred the Liturgy in a foreign language, in which it was properly sung. In other words, you have to make sacrifices in order to achieve anything. We owe a great deal to those who sang properly in English, showing others that the Liturgy in English could be just as beautiful as in Slavonic. Actions speak louder than words.

Yes, mistakes were made in the past, but we learned from those mistakes. Take for example our English translations which stretch back to the turn of the 20th century, nearly 150 years ago, those made in the USA with the blessing of the holy Patriarch Tikhon by an Episcopalian Isabel Hapgood and by Orlov in England. Those were foundation stones. Yes, those translations have been improved and on the way we have seen archaic translations in a Latinate, Victorian style like those of Hapgood or even with 16th century spelling, we have seen those made into street English as well as into soulless, jarring academic English, all sorts, but today we have definitive translations, avoiding all those extremes. It is easy to criticize, but the fact is that without those tireless efforts of the past, however mistaken they sometimes were, we would not be where we are now.

Let us first of all thank our recent fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in Christ who went before us, who built our Church, our parishes and our souls. Our Metropolia, in effect, the Church of the Old and the New Europe, would not exist without them. But let us also thank the saints of the first millennium. Through venerating them, we have earned their prayers and because of their prayers we are here today. We are built not on dead souls, but on spiritually alive souls, whether of the distant past or of the recent past. Always on spiritually alive souls: Remember that.

A Secular Meeting Rejected: A Council Proposed

‘God so loved the world that He did not send a committee’.

The Georgian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, many respected hierarchs and theologians everywhere and now Mt Athos have all decisively rejected several of the draft documents for the meeting of selected Orthodox bishops in Crete in June. Not only this, but they have also rejected the secretive methodology, the terms and the presumptious name of this so far Small, Unholy and Part-Orthodox Meeting. Compromising the Truth of Christ with stale, humanist, political Committeespeak, those documents have now been comprehensively rejected by the people of God.

The secularist organizers of the meeting in the State Department in Washington will have to think again. They may have conquered the Protestant and Roman Catholic institutions with ease decades ago, but the Christian Church tells not of heterodoxy, but another story, quite unknown to them. True, they have appointed two, and probably three, of the Patriarchs of the fourteen Local Churches, cunningly splitting the Serbian Church, and infiltrated other Local Churches, including the Russian, with their liberal, meat-eating agents of treason, with whom they attempt to influence the still free Patriarchs. However, their proposals for a robber Council have already been met with decisive non-reception by the Church.

It is not clear how these thwarted masonic organizers will act now. Their secularist agenda, the laughing-stock of the Orthodox world, has been dismissed. Of course, as usual, their agents have begun insulting the faithful, calling them pharisees, obscurantists and fanatics, trying to ban the word ‘heretic’. That there are a few pharisees, obscurantists and fanatics we will not deny. But they are a tiny minority outside the Church who have run away, refusing to fight inside the Church. They are not the faithful clergy and people who from inside the Church have for decades been calling for a rethink of the whole top-down project, its methodology (behind closed doors by the politically unfree), its lack of canonicity (banning most Orthodox bishops from attending and inviting heretics instead) and its Secularspeak documents, drafted by compromised diplomats, mantra-repeating philosophers and intellectuals, but not by Orthodox Christians.

Perhaps, instead of a mere but very expensive meeting in sunny Crete, we should now hold a Council, at which the Gospel Truth will be proclaimed to the whole world, since most of it has still never heard it. All Orthodox bishops should be invited and none silenced for fear of contradicting politically-bound heads of Local Churches. Documents plainly cobbled together by spiritually dead compromise and still tainted by Diplomatspeak, with their secularist ‘human dignity’ and ‘human personality’, should be thrown away into the dustbin of history. Let us speak the honest language of the Church Fathers and invite no heretics. Instead of wasting time and money, telling us that fasting is important and suggesting in self-contradictory terms that Non-Orthodox may be outside the Church (when we have also always known that they are), the bishops could, in these last days, talk about the things that really matter.

Representing 216 million Orthodox Christians in a world where over seven billion are outside the Church, all our bishops could call the rest of the world to salvation inside the Church, in the fresh and lucid language of the Church. In the clearest of terms they could proclaim and teach the Gospel Truth without compromising themselves by reference to the Western heresies of Christianity, which have poisoned much of the world against their false Christianity (but not against Orthodox Christianity), and translate the service books into the world’s main languages. The world faces its end, its multiple means of self-destruction are plain for all to see. It is now vitally urgent to call it to repentance before that end.

If there is to be a Church Council, let it take as its patrons St John the Baptist, St Mark of Ephesus and St Justin of Chelje. Let it speak clearly of repentance, the teaching on the Church and Her truth as opposed to Western heresies, let us speak of the revelations of the Holy Spirit. Let the Council speak to the nearly seven billion Muslim, Hindus, Buddhists and Secularists (those more or less lapsed from Western and other heresies, however they may still call themselves) and call them all to repentance, to the only-saving and only-resurrecting Truth of Christ. Their gods, prophets and princes are all dead: Christ Alone is not dead, but lives Risen from the Tomb, trampling down death by death. Let the Council say in uncompromised words: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’. Then it will indeed be a Council, and so our Council, and so will go down in history.

Why the Non-Commemorators are Mistaken

In the Gospels Christ tells us that although we are in the world, we are not of it, that although we are incarnate on earth here and now, our destiny is in heaven. Human errors have all been due to the failure to live according to these words. Either to the failure not to be incarnate here and now and to drift away into intellectual speculations and disincarnate daydreams and philosophies: such have been the tendencies either of Western intellectuals or of Non-Christian religions – indeed many such intellectuals have been attracted to Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism, for example, for that very reason. Or else to the human failure to forget that our destiny is in heaven, to concentrate only on the incarnate here and now: such have been the tendencies of the Roman Catholic and Protestant deviations of Christianity, with their concentration on the thisworldly organization of the affairs of men, instead of the balanced God-Man, Christ, the Son of God become incarnate as man and calling us to heaven.

Put in terms of Church history and human deformations of the Church, the first said that Christ the Son of God never became man, the second said that Christ was not the Son of God. The first deformation, denying the Incarnation, went down in early history as Monophysitism, the second, denying possible human salvation, as Arianism. Later, in the fourteenth century, they appeared again, combined in the one heresy of Barlaam of Italy, who said that since God was unknowable (Monophysitism), man would have to rely on his autonomous reason to live (Arianism). Here was the justification for Western humanism and Renaissance paganism and all that has followed to this day – man the measure of all things. St Gregory Palamas opposed this heresy and expressed the universal Christian teaching, distinguishing between the essence and the energies of God. In modern, secular times the same two heresies have appeared as disincarnate, Western liberalism and petty, worldly nationalism.

Thus, today the Orthodox Christian world still suffers from these same constant enemies of the Faith, from petty, inward-looking nationalism of the ghetto and disincarnate, pro-Western liberalism of the intellectuals. In 1453 the latter betrayed Constantinople and provoked its fall and in 1917 it collaborated in the trap sprung by the West in Russia, provoking the February Revolution, later taken over by the Bolsheviks, and then dividing the Russian emigration between true White and false White. Thus, it can be asserted that the New Martyrs of Russia are ultimately the victims of the treachery of Western liberalism, for without Western support and finance the Bolsheviks would never have seized power. Without apostate wealthy aristocrats (including members of the Romanov Family), treasonous generals and Anglophile Duma freemasons, there would never have been any New Martyrs. Their anti-Orthodox and therefore anti-Russian treachery drips with the blood of the betrayed millions.

Then there is the second enemy, nationalism, which, unlike patriotism, which is love of God’s Creation, is simply worldliness, love of man’s creation. It betrayed the universalism of Old Rome, taken over by barbarian-minded Franks, and of New Rome, taken over by Hellenist nationalism. Unlike the petty nationalism of others in the past and today, petty Russian nationalism is worse because Russia has a vocation to defend all Orthodox of all nationalities and to witness to all the fragments of Christianity, a vocation to be Imperial, to be above ghetto nationalism. Examples of nationalism are the treasonous Old Ritualists, who openly supported the 1917 Revolution, a few divisive Russophobic émigrés who sympathized with Hitler, trying to undermine the Church Outside Russia and then siding with Western spies, and in our own times the pro-Old Ritualist Solzhenitsyn. His anti-patriotic nationalism, like that of all Russian nationalists, ironically ended up supporting Western liberals.

On this subject of inward-looking nationalism, there are now in Moldova, the Ukraine and on Mt Athos nearly seventy individuals, mainly monks, including one vicar-bishop and over a dozen priests, who refuse to commemorate Patriarch Kyrill at services. There are two reasons for the decisions of these non-commemorators. Firstly, there was the February meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and the Bishop of Rome in Cuba, for which the Russian Orthodox world had not been prepared although secret preparations for it had been under way for six months, and the vague joint declaration that they issued afterwards. This came after the disturbing document regarding relations between the Church and the heterodox world, released some two weeks earlier in Geneva, in preparation for the meeting of some Orthodox bishops in Crete in June. For some completely incomprehensible reason, this has provocatively already been called ‘a Holy, Pan-Orthodox Council’, when so far it is none of these things.

Seventy people make up 0.00004% of the Russian Orthodox world. We think their first concern is exaggerated. The document issued was after all a diplomatic one, not a dogmatic one and in their sincere simplicity they failed to distinguish between the two aspects. As for the second document, it is only a draft and has already been rejected by several Local Churches and many prominent and well-respected bishops in several countries. Even if it were passed as such, the vast majority, myself included, would either ignore it or tear it up. Such top-down decisions, taken without the slightest consultation with the masses, cannot be enforced. However, I do have a much more serious concern, which I wish the non-commemorators would share. They seem not to realize that since 2014 the Russian Orthodox world has been in a state of war, after an attack on the Ukraine, which toppled the legitimate government and installed an anti-Orthodox, Fascist junta in Kiev, ‘the Mother of Russian Cities’.

This is part of the Neocon-initiated World War, which has reduced a large part of Western Asia and Northern Africa, from the coasts of the Atlantic to the foothills of the Hiamalyas, to terrorist anarchy. This has resulted in the deaths of up to two million and well over ten million refugees, leading to the mass deChristianization of Iraq and Syria. It has also ravaged Eastern Europe, economically and in ex-Yugoslavia, militarily, where part of the population is affected by cancer from uranium-tipped NATO shells and menaced by the US-installed terrorist regime in Kosovo. It has also seen Russian Orthodox forces in combat in Syria, supporting Orthodox and friends of Orthodox next to the Holy Land, by Armageddon. In the post-Soviet world it is one thing for ‘Orthodox’ liberals and nationalists from anywhere in the Orthodox world to criticize or disagree with the Patriarch of Rus’. He may not be ideal (who is?), but to stop commemorating him during what is a World War, is almost treasonous.

Orthodox England

events 'blog

Category Archives: Orthodox Unity

1916-2016: Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’.

From Fragments to Wholeness

The Resurrection of the Christian Empire

Christ the Invincible Power

1916-2016: 100 Years of Saints and Traitors

Russian Orthodox Church also to Abandon Crete Meeting?

The Imperial Orthodox Faithful

About Ionan Orthodoxy: An Interview with Archbishop George of London

A Secular Meeting Rejected: A Council Proposed

Why the Non-Commemorators are Mistaken